The Times, V.O.

Those members of the New York newspaper-reading public who rise bleary-eyed at seven every morning to go and search for the previous day's edition of the great Paris daily Le Monde (a group that probably numbers in the low one figure) got a shock with their orange juice the other morning. Deep in the pages of the April 7th edition— along with the usual highly philosophical op-ed pieces and highly condensed sports section and highly condescending editorials—there was, well, us. Not us, exactly, but one of our neighbors: a twelve-page insert from the Times, a digest of the past week's stories, photographs, and reviews. There it was, bound into the voice of the French establishment: the familiar Times Gothic banner, its section heads, its bylines, even its charming way of slipping a photograph of a half-dressed babe (Kate Moss, in this case) into the paper under the rubric of social inquiry (are we fair to fat women?).

And—this is the part that is not just shocking but earthshaking, suggesting comets bouncing off the heads of dinosaurs, the Lisbon earthquake, and the storming of the Bastille—the entire supplement, created for the French edition, was published in English. Le Monde was announcing, blandly, that it now expected its readers to spend some time every week reading American news as Americans see it, in American (which is what the paper often calls our language). If one imagined the Times asking its readers to read twelve pages of French every week, one would still not comprehend the scale of this new idea, since the Times (a) wouldn't do it and (b) is not published in a country where a belligerent defensiveness about the national language is a defining characteristic.

Two questions immediately presented themselves: what would the Times look like in a Mondean context, and how the hell were the editors of Le Monde going to justify this to their readers? The first question was easy: the Times, surrounded by the French pages, looked virtuous and sincere, and even a little wide-eyed, like a Henry James hero entering a Paris hotel. Where the pages of Le Monde were, as always, devoted to standing conventional wisdom on its head, so that all the blood just pools there while the writer waves his feet in the air, the Times stood up and told it straight. (Even when the Times was being philosophical, it looked innocent. Might America be an empire? one writer wondered. Le Monde's readers settled that question in their own minds long ago.) The "news" stories in the French paper tended to flit by the news on the way to a Higher Theory, but the American paper was as fact-filled as a science project; you almost expected to see a blue ribbon pinned to it.

The day's lead editorial in Le Monde —written, presumably, by Jean-Marie Colombani, the editor-in-chief, or one of his adjoints—was entitled "Plusieurs Mondes," or "Many Worlds," and devoted itself entirely to the question Why English? Le Monde looked the question over, raised its hauteur, and then patted itself on the back: "In the battle against the uniformization of the world, bilingualism—or multilingualism—is a weapon that maintains diversity. It's the strategy of the weak toward the strong: mastering the language of dominant usage permits one to better defend the identity of one's own language." And then, in a mildly mischievous tone, Le Monde hinted that the Times was, like it, an organ of the great Centrist Consensus: "Nothing could be worse, in the uncertain period that began on September 11th, than to identify the American people as a whole, and the American press, with the policies followed by the Maison Blanche. To discover the New York Times, especially in the original version, is to know Americans better in all their diversity. It is to understand their vision of the world, which is both like and unlike our own, and is definitely more complex, more open, less self-absorbed than the impression one gets from the State Department or the Pentagon."

According to Tom Carley, the president of the News Services division of the Times, the supplement is being published on a trial basis. There had been conversations about doing the insert in French, but Le Monde insisted on English. Yet, after the shock of the thing passed, it was impossible not to keep thinking about the last paragraph of Le Monde's editorial, which ended in a genuinely noble and memorable manner. "What menaces us all at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in France, as in the United States, but also in Israel, as in Palestine, in India, as in Pakistan," the editors wrote, "is the isolating of the Other in his identity—national, ethnic, or religious. . . . To better know the Other in his own language and his own imagination is not to renounce oneself. It is, on the contrary, to accept the plurality of worlds, the diversity of visions, and, above all, a respect for differences." A recondite literary allusion lies in the phrase "plurality of worlds": it comes from the title of one of the great books of the French Enlightenment, Bernard Le Bovier Fontenelle's seventeenth-century "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds," which is one of the first published works of popular science. Fontenelle explored the idea that there might be many worlds out there in the universe, with many tongues and many points of view, to suggest, subversively, that it would be only natural to expect lots of points of view, tongues, and ideas down here on earth, too. It remains an—no, the—enlightened thought.